The Key

I was just walking down the streets of town on a bright and sunny day. It had started out just fine. All of a sudden, it was like the sun had gone behind the clouds, and it grew really hazy. I glanced upward to find some explanation for it. The sky had gone a dark red color, like blood. Looking back in front of me, I realized that the buildings weren’t buildings anymore.
The buildings had turned into bulging piles. Curious, I got nearer to one to figure out what had happened and what it was. I reached out to touch one of the piles because I still couldn’t make it out through all of the haze. As soon as I touched it, something flopped down toward me. Springing back, I calmed my mind and took stock of what I had felt when I had felt it for that split second.
It had felt like material. But more than that too. I touched it lightly at first, but when whatever it was had flopped toward me, my finger had pushed forward before coming back. I had encountered something harder, though also malleable. I was curious.
Moving forward, I took a brief overview of the thing that had fallen towards me. It was long, but not too long. Cylindrical with folds. Curious, I reached out to it. As I put my hand around it, I recoiled. It felt like I had just grasped an arm. It couldn’t be an arm. I was just in town.
Looking behind me to where I had just come from, I found nothing but more piles of whatever it was that I was investigating here. Where the town went, I didn’t know. Turning back to the item in front of me, I couldn’t think it was actually an arm, so I grasped it again and pulled it up through the haze.
When it broke through the haze to where I could see it, I backed up quickly. Attached to the cylindrical object was a hand. Pale and cold. I had to accept that the item was an arm! I backed up too far. I bumped into the wall behind me.
Looking back at what I had bumped into, I gasped. Ms. Penny’s cold, glassy eyes were staring back at me from where her head protruded from the mass of bodies stacked on her. Backpedaling, I tripped over my own two feet. Going down hard, I splashed into a puddle, like things couldn’t get any worse.
Picking my hand up out of the puddle to push myself back up, I looked at the liquid streaming off of my hand. Dark red. Thicker than water. Blood. I was sitting in a puddle of blood. Swallowing the bile that rose in my throat, I scrambled to get up, futilely scraping at the blood on my pants in an effort to get it off. It wasn’t going to come off; it had soaked through to my skin.
“Jack.” I turned to the menacing use of my name.
At first all I saw was the barrel of a gun. Looking past it, I saw Marticelli. These were his victims! He grinned at me.
“Say goodbye, Jack,” he said before pulling the trigger.